In today’s scientific livestock industry, cattle are often given antibiotics. Not as medicine but “to fatten them up.” Apparently the drugs kill beneficent bacteria in the animal’s digestive system that causes them to put on weight. Now the light has dawned in the minds of some medical researchers. Could the heavy use of antibiotics among human beings be a factor in our obesity problems? Are we fattening ourselves up like drugged cattle in a feed lot? See Early use of antibiotics linked to obesity, research finds – The Washington Post.

In other antibiotic news, a “superbug“–a strain of bacteria completely resistant to all known antibiotics killed six people at the National Institute of Health’s Clinical Center. The linked article estimates that 6% of American hospitals are infested with this thing. (This doesn’t seem to be a case of what scientists have been worried about, bacteria that have developed a resistance to antibiotics because of their overuse and evolved into something that cannot be killed. [That wouldn't be evolution, by the way, just natural selection, which I don't think anyone denies. Faster animals outrun predators, animals adapt, and the fittest do survive. What Darwin did was insist that natural selection eventually turns one species into another.] Anyway, this superbug is normally one of those friendly bacteria that inhabits our bodies, but when a person’s immune system goes wrong, it turns into a monster.

Some good new words here: Inactivity Studies; Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (a.k.a. NEAT). Also, I daresay, some good advice:

James Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has an intense interest in how much people move — and how much they don’t. He is a leader of an emerging field that some call inactivity studies, which has challenged long-held beliefs about human health and obesity. . . .

His initial question — which he first posed in a 1999 study — was simple: Why do some people who consume the same amount of food as others gain more weight? After assessing how much food each of his subjects needed to maintain their current weight, Dr. Levine then began to ply them with an extra 1,000 calories per day. Sure enough, some of his subjects packed on the pounds, while others gained little to no weight.

“We measured everything, thinking we were going to find some magic metabolic factor that would explain why some people didn’t gain weight,” explains Dr. Michael Jensen, a Mayo Clinic researcher who collaborated with Dr. Levine on the studies. But that wasn’t the case. Then six years later, with the help of the motion-tracking underwear, they discovered the answer. “The people who didn’t gain weight were unconsciously moving around more,” Dr. Jensen says. They hadn’t started exercising more — that was prohibited by the study. Their bodies simply responded naturally by making more little movements than they had before the overfeeding began, like taking the stairs, trotting down the hall to the office water cooler, bustling about with chores at home or simply fidgeting. On average, the subjects who gained weight sat two hours more per day than those who hadn’t. . . .

The good news is that inactivity’s peril can be countered. Working late one night at 3 a.m., Dr. Levine coined a name for the concept of reaping major benefits through thousands of minor movements each day: NEAT, which stands for Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. In the world of NEAT, even the littlest stuff matters. McCrady-Spitzer showed me a chart that tracked my calorie-burning rate with zigzagging lines, like those of a seismograph. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to one of the spikes, which indicated that the rate had shot up. “That’s when you bent over to tie your shoes,” she said. “It took your body more energy than just sitting still.”

Santa is a bad role model for children and needs to lose weight, according to a wide-spread sentiment that has even reached the professional Santa community. A sample:

As the obesity epidemic has swollen, some public health experts have cast an increasingly critical eye on Santa's sprawl. Two years ago, acting Surgeon General Steven K. Galson said Santa's corpulence was setting a bad example. His remarks prompted howls of protest, with more than a few people accusing Galson of being politically correct in trying to make Santa physiologically correct.

An opposing expert opinion comes from Andrea Vazzana, a psychologist who specializes in weight management at New York University's Child Study Center. She says a svelte Santa "would be great for Santa, but I don't think children would benefit. The children who are believers in Santa, in that age range, they don't have a whole lot of say in what they eat."

Eating cookies that a billion or so children left for him would indeed put a strain on the waistline. Especially since he eats them all in one night.

UPDATE: In answer to Dan Kempin, a forensic reconstruction of the physically fit, non-smoking, fur-free Santa: